“THERE WAS AN incident on the show last week. Sinéad O’Connor tore up a picture of the Pope, and I thought that was wrong.”
It was announced yesterday that Sinéad O’Connor had passed away at the age of 56. True to her status as an icon of Irish music, social media has since been flooded with images of the singer – creating a scrollable catalogue of her music videos, her performances, her work as an activist, her moments of personal joy and sorrow, the rollercoaster of her life and career.
One image has gained particular purchase: that of a young O’Connor, just 25 years old in fact, standing in a white-lace outfit, defiance in her eyes, and a half-torn photo of Pope John Paul II in her hands. It’s a screengrab from the end of her live performance of Bob Marley’s ‘War’ on Saturday Night Live, in October 1992.
It had been an unforgettable rendition of the song even before O’Connor produced and destroyed the photograph. She sang without accompaniment, and infused her own lyrics, naming child abuse among Marley’s original themes of racism and conflict.
“Fight the real enemy,” she said, to shocked silence from the crowd, as she tore the photograph of the Pope into halves and then quarters. It would be the decisive moment of her career.
The incident was met with a violent fury, and changed the world’s perception of Sinéad O’Connor. NBC reportedly received thousands of phone-calls criticising the performance. Frank Sinatra called her “a stupid broad”.
The unlikely ringleader of this vitriol was the host of the next week’s Saturday Night Live, actor Joe Pesci, who spent his entire opening monologue making angry and violent remarks about O’Connor.
Pesci’s monologue has aged poorly for a number of reasons (it begins with a celebration of Columbus Day, which he says is important to him because he’s Italian), but his comments about O’Connor – which were received with great laughter and applause by the studio audience – make especially disturbing reading now.
“I’ll tell you one thing: She’s very lucky it wasn’t my show. ’Cause if it was my show, I woulda gave her such a smack. I woulda grabbed her by her eyebrows,” he said. Many media reports suggest that O’Connor was either officially or unofficially banned from the NBC flagship show, and she never appeared on it again.
“She’s just a kid, why should I care?” Pesci concluded. You can still watch Pesci’s monologue on the official Saturday Night Live YouTube channel, but it’s pretty unpleasant viewing.
Just days later, O’Connor would be booed off stage when performing at a tribute to Bob Dylan concert at Madison Square Garden. The absurd irony of O’Connor being heckled for singing a protest song during a tribute to Bob Dylan brings little comfort.
To this day, there has been no apology from Saturday Night Live or Pesci for the vilification O’Connor suffered in the wake of the performance.
The incident transformed O’Connor’s fortunes as a recording artist. Where her previous album had been a global number one, including in the US, the follow-up ‘Am I Not Your Girl?’ which she was promoting at the time of the SNL performance peaked at 27, and her 1994 record ‘Universal Mother’, peaked at 36.
Her record sales would continue to drop significantly over the next two decades, marking October 1992 as an inflection point in her commercial success.
It is for that reason that O’Connor’s ‘War’ performance is thought of as the defining moment of career — the moment her career came off the rails. O’Connor herself agreed that it was the defining moment of her career, but she saw it as the moment that she established exactly who she wanted to be.
In an interview for Esquire, O’Connor reflected on the incident: “People say ‘oh, you fucked up your career,’ but they’re talking about the career they had in mind for me.
“I fucked up the house in Antigua that the record company dudes wanted to buy. I fucked up their career, not mine. It meant I had to make my living playing live, and I am born for live performance.”
And of course, more important than anything else, Sinéad O’Connor was right. During the papacy of Pope John Paul II, child abuse and cover-ups of abuse were endemic in Ireland and across the world, while individuals, institutions and governments turned a blind eye.
The SNL performance defined the path of O’Connor’s career, but the image defines her as the person she was.
It defines her as a woman who spoke truth to power at great personal cost, who paid no heed to tradition in service of barbaric behaviour, and an unapologetic champion of causes ahead of their time, waiting for the world to catch up.
The Journal has reached out to Saturday Night Live for comment.
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